November 2012: Retrospecticus

So November, the white-hot epicenter of rarity chasing, has come and gone and it seems like every birder in North America except for me has spent the month looking at ridiculous rarities. Well, I guess that’s not entirely true, this has actually been a pretty good month for the birds, starting and finishing with a North Carolina Iceland Gull at Falls Lake. So, admittedly, for some this complaint will fall on deaf ears.

In fact, I retract it all. This was a pretty great month. Lots of exciting things, not necessarily related to field birding, happened. I wrote about most of them.

Carolina Wren, Falls Lake-Rolling View, Durham Co, NC

Barack Obama won re-election, no doubt bouyed by my ringing “at least he beats the other guy” endorsement. Seriously though, I realize the environmental movement has been something of a whipping boy for nigh-on 35 years now, but it would be nice to see at least one of the major political parties give a flying flip about, as polls show, a significant majority of Americans care about. By that I mean conservation of public lands. Though that enthusiasm gets somewhat muted when you start talking about specific tracts of land it seems to me. Anyway…